Pantheon’s August producer letter has arrived this week with a bunch of good news for fans of the game: Visionary Realms has hired a new associate content creator straight out of the community, and it’s still riding high from the pre-alpha session held earlier this month.
“It was 33 straight hours of testing and it was glorious,” Pantheon’s Chris Perkins and Ben Dean say. Most notably, players got their hands on the Monk, the trait system, new NPC abilities, the diminishing returns system, enemy, AI, and several new caster spells. Since that event, the studio has patched in an early build for the Ranger, parts of Wild’s End, trapmaker AI, new VFX, better assets, and foundations for things like leaping, charging, and frozen status.
The list of things still on the to-do list before a real notion of alpha is significantly longer; the team wants the Monk fully implemented, plus work on guilds, pets, asset streaming, the perception system, banks, acclimation, gathering and crafting, climbing… it’s a lot, but forunately, some of it is already well past the design process. It’s also changed its plans for the pet classes:
“We had previously announced our plans to finish the Ranger and Summoner classes before moving into the HDRP and Networking phase of development. Our reasoning for this was to finish the most complicated Class systems early in order to have those systems available for building out NPC combat, encounter designs, etc. (Basically, we wanted to incorporate the ranged combat system and Pets into our NPC designs). While we finished the ranged combat system, we also realized that the Pet system (and by extension the Beckoning system for Rangers) would be too heavily dependent on the networking overhaul to be performant. Therefore we’ve decided to postpone finishing the Ranger and the Summoner until after the new Network stack is in place. This is good and bad news. It’s bad news for people who have been excited about the Ranger and Summoner – this means you’ll have to stay patient for a bit longer. But it’s also really good news on two fronts: We have now moved fully into our Terrain Streaming/HDRP/Networking phase of development. [And] all of the strides we’ve made in the development of our ability system and tools will now allow us to bring the Cleric, Paladin and Warrior online. You can expect to see updates on those Classes soon, including the order you can expect to see us complete them.”
